Who knew that Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan went shooting with Justice Antonin Scalia — and liked it so much she has graduated from clay pigeons to live birds? This is one of the terrific inside stories about the justices in Jeffrey Toobin's new book about the court, "The Oath: The ObamaWhite House and the Supreme Court.

This piece first ran in Printers Row Journal, delivered to Printers Row members with the Sunday Chicago Tribune and by digital edition via email. Click here to learn about joining Printers Row.

The book's title is inspired by Chief Justice John Roberts' flub while administering President Barack Obama's inaugural oath. It turns out Roberts' gaffe resulted from over-rehearsal. He recited the oath aloud so often at home that his wife said, "the dog thinks it's the president." Obama's unexpectedly quick response to the first phrase threw off the rote words that Roberts had memorized.

But it is the court's decision to uphold the Obama health-care law that dominates the book. Toobin confirms that Roberts shifted from initial support for reversing the law to an opinion joining the four more liberal justices in upholding it. He traces that outcome back to an early email by then-Solicitor General Kagan in which she disqualified herself from decision-making at the Justice Department. He calls it "among the most consequential of such messages in American history," because it allowed Kagan to participate and provide the fifth vote to uphold the law after she became a justice.

Toobin offers a striking picture of the justices in the courtroom the morning the health-care decision was announced: "They looked as they had never appeared before: haggard, exhausted, spent. (Sonia) Sotomayor was bent with fatigue; (Samuel) Alito needed a haircut; Kagan seemed thin and drawn … Scalia appeared ... bereft, heartbroken, and angry, too."

The Supreme Court allows no photographs, but one could ask others present if they agree with that description. For most of the book no such verification is possible. Toobin writes in the Bob Woodward style of novelistic omniscience, based upon not-for-attribution interviews with the justices — which begs the question, all of them? — and more than 40 of their law clerks. I hope it is all accurate, because it is so vivid that it will be hard to get out of mind if it is someday rebutted by a historian who is a less effective writer.

The book is much weaker when it moves from such descriptive material to an effort to put the court's decisions into a larger narrative of their significance. It suffers from the cable channel vice (usually not evident on CNN, where Toobin is a commentator): Everything is made to fit into a split of conservative versus liberal.

The urge to simplify is at work when Toobin discusses the court's 2010 decision in the Citizens United case that unleashed the Super PACs by holding that the First Amendment protects corporate-funded communications in connection with an election. Toobin thinks the case was wrongly decided, as do I. But he makes no effort to present it as anything but a partisan battle. "Citizens United was a case about Republicans versus Democrats," he writes. "The real question for (Roberts) was how much he wanted to help the Republican Party. Roberts' choice was: a lot."

This caricature gives no weight to the majority decision as the expression of a strong commitment to the First Amendment, albeit one that Toobin and I think is misplaced. Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who knew that his 1968 New Hampshire campaign against an incumbent president of his own party depended on massive financial support from a few individuals, joined in a First Amendment challenge to the first federal campaign finance law. The closest Toobin comes to acknowledging a principled other side to the argument is to note that the American Civil Liberties Union supported the corporation side. He dismisses that by saying "the ACLU was eccentric." It is sometimes extreme, even fanatical, in its commitment to freedom of speech — but the ACLU is not eccentric.

Toobin goes furthest in depicting the court as a stark partisan battleground in his portrayal of Roberts, the book's central figure, as "a skilled and powerful advocate for the full Republican agenda." He describes that agenda as: "expand executive power, end racial preferences intended to assist African-Americans, speed up executions, prohibit all forms of gun control, welcome religion into the public sphere, deregulate political campaigns and, above all, reverse Roe v. Wade."

It is possible that Toobin ran into Roberts late one night at a D.C. bar and the chief justice gave him the inside word on his agenda and how he plans to achieve it. But nothing in the book persuades me that Roberts is in fact such a partisan ideologue in his judicial role, and that characterization is belied by his professional history and his public statements about the judiciary.

After law school Roberts clerked for Judge Henry Friendly, who was a generation's role model for disinterested and wholly non-ideological decision-making. He then clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who was a more ideological figure; but asked what he most admired about Rehnquist, Roberts said, "over (his) time on the Court, the method of analysis and argument shifted to the more solid grounds of legal arguments — what are the texts of the statutes involved, what precedents control."

At his confirmation hearing, admittedly not an occasion to come clean on an ideological agenda, Roberts was eloquent in describing judges as neutral "umpires" deciding cases according to law. And Roberts spent the largest portion of his professional life before joining the court as a partner in a large corporate law firm. While it is possible in conversations among partners in such firms to express an ideological point of view, the discussion tends to pivot quickly away if someone mentions a prospect of new legal business. If you want to be an ideologue, you become a law school professor.

Above all, the portrayal of Roberts as primarily an "advocate for the full Republican agenda" runs up against the most important action he has yet taken as a justice: voting to uphold the Obama health-care law. The only way Toobin can possibly reconcile that vote with his depiction of Roberts is to see it as a calculated act designed to insulate the court from political criticism when it engages in future efforts to achieve conservative goals. That is in fact the way Toobin portrays it — so maybe their late night bar conversation went that far.

But the conservatives who are now enraged with Roberts are not angry about legal doctrine; they are angry because they lost a unique opportunity to damage the re-election prospects of a Democratic president. And a re-elected president will do what matters most to the future of the Supreme Court: appoint justices.

If Roberts' primary objective were really to carry out the Republican agenda, then surely he miscalculated in not taking action that would have damaged Obama severely by declaring illegal his major domestic accomplishment. That miscalculation would be inconsistent with one fact about Roberts that is undisputed by anyone in Toobin's book: Even if he did garble the presidential oath, he is not stupid. Toobin seems to me to miss the other unequivocal fact that emerges from Roberts' decision in the health-care case: He has the capacity to surprise almost all of us.

John Schmidt, a partner at Mayer Brown, served as U.S. associate attorney general under former President Bill Clinton.